One concept that is gaining a fair amount of popularity and is being studied more intensively is the concept of bio-refineries. You wouldn't extract a single product out of a single plant. A typical plant might contain something like 40,000 different compounds that have been synthesized, essentially, through water and solar energy.
Can we extract more value out of a plant than a single compound? We need to undertake more detailed studies as to what products can be extracted, what markets there are to push those markets out of the farm gate, and what processes need to be created to extract that value out of the crops and create new products with them.
What is emerging out of the studies that are being done across the country and across organizations--not only AAFC, but also organizations like Natural Resources Canada, National Research Council and others--and from academic studies in the university sector, is that we will have to adapt a variety of feedstocks to a different set of products and market realities.
It's unlikely that we can develop only a single feedstock, a single plant, to address the variety of market opportunities that are out there, and that's precisely why the agriculture biomass innovation program aims at developing different feedstocks for a different range of products. Each country will have to find its own feedstocks in relation to potential markets and in relation to the potential for growing that feedstock.
No one in Canada has yet put his or her finger on a single feedstock that will answer all solutions, that will provide all solutions to all sectors, to all kinds of products. People are talking about bioplastics, biomaterials, composites, replacement chemicals, displacing fossil fuels, and producing chemicals from biomass. There's a great deal of uncertainty yet in that sector, and we need more work.